Add ability to change issue owner

Sometimes, I submit an issue, but down the road am no longer responsible for tracking it. I'd like to be able to change the owner of the issue so that I no longer receive emails on the issue and it is clearer who is responsible for tracking issue. The new owner can already make themselves watcher to get the emails but this change would eliminate that step.

History

A related use case is one where somebody creates an issue for somebody else. For instance when somebody mails me an issue, I don't want to reply 'create a ticket' but want to be able to add it myself and make him or her the issue owner.

A related use case is one where somebody creates an issue for somebody else. For instance when somebody mails me an issue, I don't want to reply 'create a ticket' but want to be able to add it myself and make him or her the issue owner.

I don't really understand the point. You have a field called "Assigned to" which is perfect for this purpose no ? And if you don't want to receive mail for a specific issue why don't you click on "Unwatch" action ? I'm wondering if I missed something here...

Indeed I don't understand why author and assignee auto-watching does not use the global watching mecanism. It would be much simpler to get automatically added to the list of watchers when you open an issue or when your are assigned to it, so that you can latter resign from watching it using the same simple mecanism. Can someone explain the current state of things please ?

I have made a patch which probably does what you guys are referencing in this issue. It allows to change the author of an issue. This is possible only when an user has permission "Edit author" (added by patch).

Field Author was renamed to Responsible which in case of our company better shows that the person is responsible for tracking the issue. Patch is applicable to Redmine 0.9.2.stable.27112

I have made a patch which probably does what you guys are referencing in this issue. It allows to change the author of an issue. This is possible only when an user has permission "Edit author" (added by patch).

Field Author was renamed to Responsible which in case of our company better shows that the person is responsible for tracking the issue. Patch is applicable to Redmine 0.9.2.stable.27112

Great Patch! I was just about to do this myself.

Works fine in 0.9.4.stable also :)

PS: I changed "Responsible" to "Reported By" as my clients didn't like the idea of being responsible... :P

I don't think there's a consensus here (at least I disagree). Maybe there could be plugin facilities, or enhanced custom fields to handle use-cases you report. But I'm still convinced that we should not provide the ability to change the author.

The author is the person who filled the ticket, it's like that, it's just the reality. If you need the author to be the guy himself, give him access to your Redmine. If he's just "the target" or "the final client" or whatever, build a custom field for that, or even a plugin if you need a custom source or dynamic things. You can even not display author anywhere if it doesn't matter to you, but in 99% of the cases I can think of, it just doesn't make any sense to change the original author of an issue.

The next step would be to allow changing the author of each comment on a ticket, which seems absurd to me. It's the same problem. "Bob left a comment. Hm, I don't like that. OK, let's say Alice left that comment. Done. Cool."

There are two roles to keep apart here, the author and the reporter. I agree that the author shouldn't be changeable, but the reporter role is different. I'd be even happy if I can only select this one on creation time, but there are enough use cases where you'd want a different reporter then the author. Walk-ins, phone and email submitted issues are among the real world examples that lead to this request and #2035. In an ideal world, all reporters would use Redmine directly, but the world is not ideal...

Also, a comment is something completely different than an issue. An issue changes over time (state, assignee etc.) while a comment is something you add to an issue while time progresses.

Still, this issue is also about notifications. If I have to submit a ticket on behalf of someone else (due to walk-in, phone or mail) but the original reporter is supposed to oversee the progress of the issue and I'm not really involved in it anymore, then I don't want to get notification mails about changes.

About the comments: I don't see a lot of value in being able to change the comment author. I someone sends me a mail with a comment about a certain issue, I add a comment to the issue quoting that person. That's good enough.

Indeed I don't understand why author and assignee auto-watching does not use the global watching mecanism. It would be much simpler to get automatically added to the list of watchers when you open an issue or when your are assigned to it, so that you can latter resign from watching it using the same simple mecanism. Can someone explain the current state of things please ?

This seems like the middle path - add the author as a watcher and allow him/her to unwatch. If he has permissions then he can add the walk in person as watcher.

I think changing autor or setting him during creation of an issue is very important, it is a common use case when we have phone calls with issues and we want to put them into redmine immediately. Sometimes users, even if they have account, they are afraid of using task management systems, so issues must be physically entered by developers or help desk.

I manage a group of developers and help Project Managers use Redmine. I frequently create issues for my team, but I don't want to get updates on every single issue just because I created the issue. I would like to set the PM as the author so she and the assigned programmer get the updates. I currently have 150+ open issues I authored, but I only want/need to get updates on about 20 of them. My only work-around is to send an email to the PM and ask her to create a new issue by copy-pasting my email. Very inefficient. Thanks.

Definitely agree that the distinction between author and reporter is a necessary one and should be in the trunk. -The author is the one who entered the issue, he's responsible for entering it correctly. This can't be changed since it's just an audit information.-The reporter is the one who is the originator of the issue, he is the "owner" of the issue and is responsible for validating any fix. This one may be different from the author (because the author may have been entering the issue on behalf of someone else) and may also be updated (because the owner of an issue may change for a number of reasons during the lifetime of the issue)

I was looking for info on how to change the author for a phone-entered ticket.I would love to see a separate author and reporter.The author is just so that we know who entered it and the reporter is the one who actually experienced the issue.Another was to phrase this is "__author__ on behalf of reporter"

Yes, there should be an destinction between who just created the ticket and who reported it. In fact in support center case with telephone reporting, never the reporter will create the ticket, but the author will know him and could manually set the reporter attribut. In case the author shall be a web service (e.g. a via a web form which will creat issues inperonisating some reporter, whoh can't/ or don't want access redmine gui directly, this is very useful.

Yehuda Katz wrote:

I was looking for info on how to change the author for a phone-entered ticket.I would love to see a separate author and reporter.The author is just so that we know who entered it and the reporter is the one who actually experienced the issue.Another was to phrase this is "__author__ on behalf of reporter"

+1I am in favor of the "Change Author" functionality.The key here is email traffic and who gets the notifications. I like to get emails for things I am the owner of and do not want that to change. However, when I create an issue on someone else's behalf, I do not want to get emails on that issue as if I was the owner. If there are other reasons of concern here (which are indicated in comments above), changing owner may not necessarily be required functionality--simply specifying the owner/reporter of an issue at creation time would be enough. That said, I am more in favor of the "Change Author"

Didn't see someone assigned the issue to me. Please don't do that, it's the best way to completely lose a ticket. I see there are a few valid use cases but I still think it should be implemented as a plugin or made optionnal if integrated in core. Btw, it seems nobody has the time/energy/money to work on this seriously for the moment...

I'd like to be able to change the owner of the issue so that I no longer receive emails on the issue

The very question is show above!I think that this bug can be closed as dupe of bug #11405.

My explanation: add ability to change bug opener\owner isn't a good choice because the BTS should be track the hystory of a bug (then also who open it). But also if I have open the bug, for some reason, it is legitimate not want to receive more mail alert after a day. The solution for this question is to provide the same behavior of bugzilla as reported in bug #11405: when user open\edit a bug can flag\unflag an option that sound as "add me as watcher". In bugzilla when user open\edit a bug this flag is per default true as show in bug #11405, but user can unflag it if want.

No pasquale [:dedalus]! Author tasks should be able to transfer it to another user (the author may leave the project, resign, die, finally).

Ciao Pavel.I don't agree: author of issue isn't a special user. If author don't want track anymore its created issue, as in request #11405, he can unflag "watchs" (as in mozilla bugzilla). We are inform about people that track bug from watchers list (see #11405) and about the user that manage the issue via the assignee.But this is only my 2 cents (based on bugzilla, jira, etc approach)

We have a "template" project which an administrator copies for a project manager when a project starts.

The administrator (the one making the copy) automatically becomes the owner of all the tasks in the project - even if he's not otherwise involved.

We'd love to be able to specify the owner when making a copy... or allowing a manager to make copies without having to give them full-out administrative powers.

We'll "solve" this issue by creating a dummy admin user to create copies and send the emails in a black hole, but being able to change the owner would help.

Or at the very least, allow the admin to have a bit more control over the email he receives. As far as I know, he has no option to make himself "non-involved" in these issues and stop receiving emails.

I had reset my redmine to 2.3.1 and tested the plugin.but I got no error ...

could you please give me the error log -> redmine/log/production.log

did you run: bundle install ?

I was talking about the changeauthor plugin and not the change_issue_author one.I have now installed (in fact I asked my IT administrator to do it, I have no access to the servor :-(( ) the change_issue_author plugin BUT I have the same problem as Michał Senderowski. Cf. my image.I don't think so but can it be linked to the language?

The author field doesn't show up when updating the page, however there is a link called "Update author" - see the image below.

Following the link results in a 500 however, here's the stack trace:

Started GET "/changeauthor/index?issue_id=30" for 82.15.175.41 at 2014-02-11 20:19:18 +0000Processing by ChangeauthorController#index as HTML Parameters: {"issue_id"=>"30"} Current user: arthur (id=4)Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 16.4ms

Here is a patch for Redmine 3.1.0 (be careful, there are changes compared to 3.0.*), which works on our pre-production server.I stripped the original patch of a change on showing "added time", and I added French translation for the new right.We're using MS SQL 2012 as our DB system.

Here is a patch for Redmine 3.1.0 (be careful, there are changes compared to 3.0.*), which works on our pre-production server.I stripped the original patch of a change on showing "added time", and I added French translation for the new right.We're using MS SQL 2012 as our DB system.

Warning: With Redmine 3.2.0, issues with Anonymous author will be updated to the first user available when this patch is active and the issue is updated with a user having the edit_issue_author right.This is due to a change in Redmine filtering the user list on active users only: see #21477.

So the patch should be changed for Redmine 3.2.0 and above users to add the original author manually in views/issues/_attributes.html.erb, so that it doesn't get changed accidentally if it became inactive between creating the issue and the latest edit:<p><< [@issue.author.name, @issue.author.id]), :include_blank => false, :required => true %></p>

[edited 2016-01-27 19:27] given the change done in #21477, it is actually safer to force having the original author in the list so as not to lose it accidentally, rather than adding Anonymous.